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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Reply to Patrick Bond</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Patrick Bond's comments on my article 'Zombie
anti-imperialists take on the Empire' <BR><A
href="http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA6BA.htm">http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA6BA.htm</A><BR>seem
more picky than thoughtful.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Most damningly, Patrick fails to understand that
there can be no epoch of transition without a subject of transition. Without a
revolutionary challenge to capitalism, all of its difficulties are only
relative, and can be overcome. Patrick tries to pooh-pooh the real expansion of
capitalism in the last ten years, failing to understand that it was the defeat
of organised labour in the preceding period that made this expansion
possible.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I said ‘it is wrong to say that the USA is awash
with capital, overflowing<BR>into the less developed world. In fact, America is
a net importer of capital, dependent upon foreign purchases of US treasury bonds
to recycle as consumer credit.’</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Patrick Bond objected ‘Harvey argues the world is
awash with capital’</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>But the lecture in question, as reported by George
Monbiot in the Guardian, argues that the Iraq war is to be understood as the
export of capital from an over-mature US economy.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I said ‘The "profit-squeeze" was widely seen
as a harbinger of economic doom’</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Patrick Bond objected 'Actually, the profit squeeze
is seen as the squeeze that tight labour markets or class struggle puts on
profits. The overaccumulation thesis - that profits stem from excessively
productive capital and underpaid labour (unable to consume the massive output of
the system) - is the opposite.'</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Yes, that's why I put 'profit squeeze' in inverted
commas, to indicate that it was the crisis as perceived, not its
cause.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I said 'Diminishing returns did cause problems.
Companies like Enron, Parmalat and Shell forged their accounts to disguise poor
earnings. But these problems never caused the difficulties that the profit
squeezes of the 1880s, 1920s or 1970s did.'</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Patrick Bond says</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>'One could argue that the overall impact of
overaccumulation is going<BR>to be worse, because the scale of displacement -
not resolution - of the problem is so much more severe.'</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Well, we could talk about what is going to happen
in the future, but since the collapse of capitalism has been announced with such
monotonous regularity we ought to ask what happened to the Asian contagion etc
etc. ('the lonely hour of the last instance never comes', Althusser said). An
ideology which depends for its verification on the arrival of judgement day is
not susceptible to verification or falsification.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Patrick Bond says</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>'Just as one example, all the debt ratios
(which indicate what Harvey terms the 'temporal fix') are far higher today in
most every country, especially the US, than the 1970s.' </FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Which seems like a very effective mechanism for
stability, so far. Will it all end in tears? Maybe, but you have to explain why
it should.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Patrick Bond says</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>'The other manifestations of crisis displacement -
the search for relative and absolute surplus value, the spatial fix through
globalisation, amplified uneven development, worsening "accumulation by
dispossession" (including via superexploitation of women) - all appear far
more advanced, and I'd argue that all are the result of the general
overaccumulation crisis as witnessed by the persistently low rates of profit in
the 1970s-90s era.'</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>It seems a bit strange to me to talk about a crisis
that lasts for thirty years. Crisis surely implies a moment when the underlying
trends manifest themselves. Your 30-year period takes in whole generations of
change. Wouldn't you agree that the crisis that manifested itself in the late
1970s - great as the social turbulence it gave rise to was - was effectively
contained in the 1980s. You do not seem to take account of Marx's proposition
that the crisis is its own resolution. By defeating organised labour in the
eighties, the capitalists laid the basis for renewed expansion from around 1993
onwards.<BR>><BR>Patrick Bond says 'Heartfield doesn't understand that a
'speculative boom' is a reflection of deep-seated crisis tendencies let loose in
the stock market. That's Marx 101.'</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Marx explained how a speculative boom might be a
reflection of crisis tendencies. But he did not - understandably - give an
account of the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s, arguing instead that each
individual crisis must be looked at in its own right. The underlying point
stands, I think. You could have argued that the dot.com bubble was the harbinger
of crisis, but the further we move from it without cataclysmic results, the less
plausible that looks.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>
<DIV><BR>I said 'Over-accumulation' for Marx, then, is the over-accumulation of
constant capital, relative to the profit-creating variable capital.'</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Patrick replies 'And in turn, the overproduction of commodities beyond the
capacities of the market to realise profits.'</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>It is true of course that in Marx's account, overaccumulation will take the
form of unsold goods, but Patrick is fudging two distinctive explanations of the
crisis, overaccumulation of capital, and overproduction of goods. The latter was
rejected by Marx in his critique of Sismondi. All of this is academic, of
course, because there is no economic crisis at present.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I said 'it was never Marx's aim to suggest there was an automatic tendency
for capitalism to break down, independent of the deliberate actions of
people.'</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Patrick replies</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>'Of course class struggle was the central theme in his work, but
there<BR>is a vibrant literature on Marx's breakdown theory - especially a 1929
book by Heinryk Grossmann (which Heartfield's group promoted very heavily just
over a decade ago).'</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I know Grossmann's book well, and worked as copy-editor on the Pluto
edition. His explanation of the counter-acting tendencies to breakdown was the
point that few people understood, thinking that Marxism meant that capitalism
was headed in only one direction. Today the point is clear: through a
generalised acquiescence from organised labour, capitalism has succeeded in
stabilising itself, largely through extensively growing, taking in far greater
numbers of workers, creating a greater mass of surplus value. To put it another
way, the objective and the subjective conditions are not absolutely distinct.
Subjective retreat on the part of the working class is itself an objective
condition, one which has given a new lease of life to capitalism.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I said: 'In fact, both the European and American workforces grew - the EU
workforce by 15million and America's by 27million - between 1986 and 2001. In
East Asia, and especially China, millions more have been drawn into the
factories. That implies an expansion of capitalist production,'</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Patrick Bond says 'Sure' conceding the point, and then goes on to complain
'but it also implies the search for absolute surplus value', which is true in
the simple sense that this is the creation of value by the creation of new
points of production, not by altering productive technique in existing
plant.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>But what Patrick means is that the expansion of the workforce implies the
search (why search?) for absolute surplus value 'given the sweatshop character
of those operations.' To which one should caution, it is not necessarily the
case that the four million new jobs in the UK are sweatshop jobs, or that the 27
million new jobs in the USA are all sweatshop jobs, nor even that the millions
of new jobs in China are all sweatshop jobs. For many of those involved, these
new jobs are an advance, not a step backwards. I doubt that the women who have
taken many of these jobs would relish a return to the past.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Patrick goes on to say that the expansion of the world workforce
'implies<BR> a worsening of uneven and combined development'. But the
opposite is true. The expansion of the world workforce is even greater in the
developing world, like China, and has stabilised economic conditions in East
Europe.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I wrote about the growth of a labour intensive service sector (implying,
which appears to be the case in Britain, that Marx's "organic composition" of
capital is falling, not rising).</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Patrick objects</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>'But JH knows the problem isn't in the economy as a whole, it's in
the 'value-creation' sector, namely sites where surplus value is extracted
in commodity production. So much of the service sector - especially financial
markets - is not about value creation, but about value *realisation*, e.g.
transporting goods further to markets, or the marketing of commodities, or the
maintenance of the commodity. It may be true that the production of some new
dematerialised commodities - images on the page or on a DVD - is more prevalent
than in Marx's time, this basic problem - distinguishing between value-producing
and nonvalue producing labour - remains a central feature of crisis theory,
which Heartfield should acknowledge here.'</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>But I think that Patrick puts to great a stress on Marx's distinction
between productive and unproductive labour, which is not in any sense synonymous
with the distinction between industry and services in contemporary economic
statistics. By far the greater part of what is called the service sector is in
Marx's sense productive, being largely a re-writing of job descriptions through
contracting out such 'services' as cleaning, catering, security and other
operations that make companies work. These are real, value-producing
enterprises. So too do I think that it does not make sense to dismiss the
expansion of the retail sector as 'unproductive', where this involves complex
and time-consuming distribution, without which goods would not be goods-for-use.
When the Co-operative Retail Society in the UK takes over the production and
distribution of farm goods, that's not predation, it's capitalist organisation.
Or to put it another way, they are not exploiting the farmers; they are
exploiting the farm labourers and the checkout staff.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I said</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>'Whatever the real movement of profits, they are not, in this
instance,<BR>a consequence of the declining ratio of workers to means of
production.<BR>While raging against 'over-accumulation', today's critics have
failed to notice that the real problem is the shortfall of investment in new
technologies, the perpetuation of drudgery and the squandering of labour in
unproductive toil.'</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Patrick goes on to insist that the shortfall of investment is evidence of
the excess of investment. He points to the 'optic fibre glut' in the US, but an
excess of product in relation to demand is not the same thing as what Marx
called an 'overaccumulation of capital' - a distinction that has evidently
passed Patrick by.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Patrick says that </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> 'JH should also consult the data on profitability from Dumenil and
Levy (Cepremap website), which strip out the interest-related (rentier) profits
from US non-financial corps and demonstrate that profit rates have remained very
low throughout the last three decades.'</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I agree, the material is very interesting. But it seems to me that if you
have to demonstrate to people statistically that they are in the grips of an
economic crisis, that somehow they cannot see, that you have a problem. Like
Chicken Licken, you spend your time telling people that the sky is falling
down.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><BR> Patrick objects when I say that the critics shy away from the
growth that took place in the 1990s:</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>'No, growth would be the capacity to maintain the 1950s-60s ('Golden Age')
investment levels forever. Because of overinvestment problems that emerged from
the early 1970s (or late 1960s) onwards, the 'growth' that capitalism has
generated has been less 'sustainable' (capable of reproducing itself) given how
quickly new markets fall victim to overproduction problems.'</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>But this is just formalism. So what if the growth that took place in the
1990s was not as profound as the growth that took place in the 1950s-60s?
(Incidentally, people living then did not experience this as a 'Golden Age', but
one that was just as problematic in its own way.) It is no good telling people
that the real improvement in their living conditions is not happening, or that
somehow it does not meet the standards of the Golden Age. There was 'stop-go' in
the sixties, too. By contrast, the last decade seems pretty stable. No doubt
there are real problems in SA, too, but would you really say that things had not
improved for ordinary people since, say, 1994?</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><BR>Patrick does allow that</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>'The overcapacity [not a term I would have used] in the system as a whole
is occasionally lessened, during recessions or the shutdown of
geographically-specific sites of industry, and the rise of the credit bubble
allows some of the commodities to be mopped up in an unsustainable consumption
boom, to be sure.'</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Which seems a bit mealy-mouthed to me, but lets go with it</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>'But moving these problems around across space or through time<BR>(credit
allows you to buy today - on hopes of realising more surplus value in the
future) is no substitute for a genuine resolution of the crisis<BR>conditions,
and for a renewal of accumulation. The last time such conditions were in place
were the 1930s-40s, when the crisis required a Great Depression and World War to
wipe out the economic deadwood that had overaccumulated.'</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The trouble with thinking in terms of the longue duree is that you are
wising away the present. Rather than trying to force real-time events into
preconceived categories, oughtn't you be trying to understand present
conditions? </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Patrick says that the recession of 1974-84 was not comparable in its
effects to the 30s and 2WW. I would say it was probably more profound. The
working class emerged from the 2WW combative, the organised labour was
effectively defeated by the 1990s. After the 2WW capitalism collapsed in Eastern
Europe and China. The 1980s saw the re-establishment of capitalist social
relations there and in the Soviet Union as well. I can tell you that in Britain
the shakeout of industry was epochal, leading to more root and branch reform
than in the 1930s.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I argued that the current period was one where the old left adapted its
Marxoid arguments to meet the moralism of today's anti-globalisation protestors,
and, as if to prove the point Patrick Bond illustrates it very well,
saying:<BR> <BR>'The 'old left's' crisis theory never adequately dealt with
the social degradations of mass capitalist culture ('personal
consumption') and especially of the ecological damage associated with rampant
capitalism, including excessive global warming and the looming exhaustion of
fossil fuels (especially petroleum). Harvey's thesis about accumulation by
dispossession, added to his geopolitics, fills some of those gaps nicely.'
</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>But all of this is just a dog's breakfast of conflicting ideas that are
only allowed to coalesce because of the lack of critical thinking in today's
'movement'.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Patrick does not even seem to notice that he is not just addressing a
loophole but inverting the socialist critique of capitalism. He says that the
old left 'never adequately dealt with the social degradations of mass capitalist
culture ("personal consumption")'. No indeed: they left that farrago of reaction
to the romantic anti-capitalists like Ruskin, Carlyle and Hitler. There concern
was to prevent hardship, not create it. Patrick's green friends no doubt hate
the fact that working class people have more goods at their disposal, and
project their own anxieties about fossil fuel depletion onto that.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
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